The Trouble With Templates

Templates are well-meaning attempts to simplify the writing process for people who have to write and find it a daunting task, either because they find it hard to get started, slow going, or difficult to organize and to come up with the right words and expressions.  I get that.  Filling in a form (which is what using a template is, after all) is easier than writing a report.

 

But there’s one truly troubling fact about template-based writing:  It’s boring.  It’s boring because it’s predictable, re-cycled, drab, dull, and lifeless.  Everything we want writing to be, yes?  No!!

 

That’s why so much business writing goes unread.  Because it’s trapped in templates which at best we skim, hoping to get the info we need, missing the detail, and remaining detached from, maybe even disinterested in, the subject.

 

But if your organization requires that you use templates, or if you just want to because it seems easier, here are two things you can do–even within the cage-like structure of a prescribed template–to invigorate your writing:

 

1.         Sound natural.  I know it’s tempting when your writing is in a box to make it sound boxy, but try sounding like a person instead. Example—a customer satisfaction form had this statement in a box:  “Your opinion is highly valued for us.”  Huh?  Read that aloud and tell me you would ever say such a thing.  It’s completely unnatural.  What’s wrong with “We value your opinion”?  Boxes encourage clumsy writing.  Try to sound natural.  (Read aloud what you’ve written, and you’ll find the problems quickly.)

 

2.         Choose fresh words.  Don’t “peel the onion” and “go for low-hanging fruit.” Don’t “hit the ground running” or claim to “think outside the box.”  Those phrases have withered away to nothing, thanks to overuse.  They have no effect whatsoever.  The first time someone said “peel an onion”—great.  The millionth time, nothing.  Peel a banana.  Think outside the cubicle.  Anything!   Leave tired language out of your documents.  There’s no rule, even in templates, that you must use tired clichés.

 

Remember: Boring writing goes unread.  Think of the wasted expense!  What’s the cost of ineffective writing in your organization?  To your project?

What Business Writing Should Learn from Writers

William Zinsser is a non-fiction writer and journalist who has written about, among many other things, writing.  In his book, On Writing Well, he summarizes the essence of good writing in four “articles of faith”: clarity, simplicity, brevity, and humanity.

 

Most business writing lacks all of those elements to some degree—especially the last one.  Even when it’s clear, simple and brief, business writing rarely demonstrates anything resembling “humanity.”  Yet so much of what business does is with, about, for, and because of human beings.

 

How is business writing stripped of its humanity?  Because most of it appears not to have been written by a human being.  Have you ever wondered why business writing never enlists humor, surprise, excitement, suspense or any of the techniques we use in everyday conversation?  It shouldn’t be hard to do.  I mean most of us talk that way.  Why can’t we infuse our business writing with a little of the same personality?

Talking About Bacteria, with Gusto

Imagine you’ve been invited to a presentation by a molecular biologist who will tell you, in some detail, about the life cycle and behavior patterns of bacteria, describing research about the ways in which bacteria operate both individually and collectively.

I know what you’re thinking: “No thanks, I’ve been to one too many technical presentations this month.  I’ll pass.”

But before you decide that “technical presentation” is just a synonym for dry and boring, check this out: Dr. Bonnie Bassler on “How Bacteria Communicate.”  Even if you don’t have the slightest interest in bacteria, tune into just how engaging this is—energetic, rehearsed, and enthusiastic (about bacteria, remember).  And notice how few slides she uses.

Here’s her 18-minute TED talk from April 2009.

http://www.ted.com/talks/bonnie_bassler_on_how_bacteria_communicate.html

Yeah, I agree, she could slow down a little (I worried she might hyperventilate!) but besides that, there’s much to take away from this if you’re a presenter who explains content-rich, technical subject matter.

Don’t Touch PowerPoint–yet

To some extent, we’re all creatures of habit.  We take our coffee a certain way, we brush our teeth at night, we listen to certain radio stations, we park in roughly the same spot at work every day.

 

When it comes to preparing presentations, we’re creatures of habit, too.  First thing we do is open up PowerPoint and cruise the selections of templates available, searching for just the right look and feel.  Or we download the corporate template, insert our information on the title page, and we’re off.

 

How about, for a change, let’s not do that.  Not this time, and not ever again.  Let’s start with a different approach.  A better way to start requires just a couple of steps to perform first, before you fire up PowerPoint.  If you’re thinking, “I don’t have time for extra steps!”—don’t panic!  I promise you there’s a return on this investment.  These couple of steps will save you time because you’ll revise less and you’ll be clearer, better organized and better understood.  That means less follow-up for you afterwards, fewer questions to field, and no damage control to worry about for those occasions where your message might have really gone off track.  These couple of steps will help to ensure your presentation is effective.  That is, after all, the point:  To create and deliver effective technical presentations.

 

Here’s the first step:  Write down your ideas, your research, analysis, your detail.  Put them on index cards. (Yes, I know this sounds embarrassingly low-tech, but it works.)  Put one idea or detail or point you want to make on a card.  Just one.  Don’t crowd two onto a single card, just one.  Do this until you have a bunch of cards onto which you’ve dumped everything you can think of to talk about on your subject. You can do this alone or with your team or presentation partner.

 

When you have most of the ideas in front of you, but you haven’t committed them to a sequence yet.  They’re just topic areas floating around on cards, waiting to be put in order.  You’re optimizing your content, deciding how to organize the points you want to make so they’ll be well-received.  You’re not just dumping your stream of consciousness onto a decorated PowerPoint slide and hoping the audience can make sense of it.  Instead, you’re starting with ideas, then arranging and re-arranging them until you have the most effective approach.

 

Then you can create slides.  (A few slides.)

Short Runway

Have you ever read a project plan, proposal, report or even an email that made no impression on you whatsoever?  That left you saying, “Yeah, and …?”  Do you ever wonder if what you write leaves people who read it asking the same thing?

 

Here’s why that happens:  The writer has no idea what he (or she) wants the reader to remember.  He just starts writing, getting something out there, whatever he can think of and, when he runs out of things to say, hits SAVE and then SEND.

 

If that seems like the best approach to you, you probably haven’t considered the consequences.

 

You want action taken thanks to what you’ve written, but you get none because your readers were left wondering what, if anything, they were supposed to remember and act on.  Or you do get some action, but it’s not what you wanted to have happen because your written material was misunderstood.  Or people reply to what you’ve written with questions you now get to spend time answering.

 

Organize what you have to say so that you know the few key points you really want to leave them with.  Start with those, keep them in mind, and make sure you feature them throughout.  Arrange your material with an important idea on top, then cascade downward to ideas that are less and less important for your reader to remember.Support your key points with details (facts, observations, background, references), of course.

 

Assume you have always a shorter runway than your full message needs to get off the ground.  Decide what you’re going to offload, and arrange accordingly.  You’ll make a more lasting impression, which is what you want, right?

Downtime Boosts Productivity

“I’m so busy” is an answer we’re used to hearing in response to “How are you?”  It’s part of our cultural norm, to be busy, to have long “to do” lists, software to manage those lists, classes in managing our priorities, optimizing our energy—all with a goal of getting more done.

 

Downtime seems frivolous because we see it as unproductive, unstructured and certainly unmeasured.  We measure productivity, throughput and accomplishment.  We look up to high achievers, people who get a lot done.  We wonder openly about people who never seem to be knocking things of the old task last.  Losers, that’s what they are.

 

“I haven’t had a vacation in years” is a badge of honor for some people.  Their subtext:  “I’m tough, I’m driven, I have a work ethic to die for.”

 

But working some regular downtime into your life is a way to boost your productivity.  Besides improving your health, besides being enjoyable (even, dare I say it, “fun”), spending time away—mentally or physically—will help you improve your productivity and the quality of the work you do.  It’s also a way to boost creativity, which has a significant role in the life of an engineer or high tech professional!

 

So what is “downtime”?  Does it mean you have to hop a plane for Kaua’i and spend a week at a beach far from home?  That’s one way, but there are others that are cheaper and easier.  Downtime can be a morning walk, an afternoon loafing around your own backyard.  It can be reading a book (that has nothing to do with work), going skiing, playing pick-up basketball, taking a nap or sitting and staring into space.

 

Have you ever noticed how an idea will come to you when you least expect it?  Have you ever, suddenly, at 3:00 a.m., remembered the answer to a question you couldn’t for the life of you think of at 3:00 p.m. the day before?  You know why that is, don’t you?  Because your brain needs a break just as much as your body does.  Did you know your body heals twice as fast when you’re asleep?  Literally, the cells regenerate twice as fast when you’re asleep as when you’re awake.

 

The same principle applies to your brain.  If you keep grinding away without a break, before long you’ll reach a point of diminishing return.  You can’t boost creative by working harder at it.  You boost creativity by not working at it, by taking a break and leaving it alone, and by trusting that those 3:00 a.m. “ah ha” moments will come.

 

You don’t have to wait for 3:00 a.m., by the way.  The reason THAT happens to you may be because that’s the only time your poor brain gets enough downtime to have an “ah ha.”  Instead, try creating a cycle for yourself that offsets hard work with relaxation.  I know on the surface it doesn’t seem like the American Way, but it works.  Some of our greatest thinkers and inventers have done this.  Did you know Thomas Edison was famous for catnaps?  That’s when some of his greatest inspirations came to him!

You Can’t Give it Away: What Marketing Has Done for Business

Here’s today’s conventional wisdom about marketing:  If you have something to sell, every minute of every day, you put your product or service in front of absolutely everyone you can using whatever means you can get your hands on.

In case you haven’t noticed, the clamor for this kind of attention is now at nerve-shattering levels.

Recently, I tried giving something away, and I was once again surprised and disappointed by how suspicious (even angry!) people can get.  Whatever happened to “thank you”?

First, a bit of background.  Besides my bread-and-butter professional work as a business communication consultant, I also have hobby business:  I encourage college liberal arts majors to see how their education can be preparing them for careers in business leadership.  I majored in English myself, then went on to a 25 year career in corporate management.  My English degree prepared me for this in ways people who don’t have a liberal arts degree don’t get.

Among the offerings in my hobby business is a blog called, simply, “For English Majors” where I detail why and how understanding literature (character and motivation), combined with the ability to analyze abstraction, is essential to business leadership.  The blog is free, not only to me but to everyone who reads and comments.  It’s a gift.  No strings attached.  No follow-up emails.  No need to subscribe.  You can visit and leave as you wish, entirely anonymously if you prefer.

I occasionally send postcards, personal emails and personal letters (yes, old fashioned letters with stamps) to invite anyone who’s the slightest bit interested in the future of English majors and the future of business—students, faculty, administrators, and hiring managers—to check it out.  What can they possibly lose?  It’s free.  It’s unusual.  It’s practical.  It’s credible.  It’s needed.  And did I mention it’s free?

Here’s what usually happens after I send postcards, emails and letters.  One in fifty results in a reply, usually from an academic for whom letter-writing is not a lost art.  A few departments link to my blog.  I write to thank them.  A university in Oregon invited me to speak to their Humanities Division.  Of course I did.

But the most telling was a university in New Hampshire whose career center wrote to ask me if it was okay to post a link to my blog on their site (of course!).  And then they wrote this:

“Once you have notified us of your approval. Please do not contact us again.  Remove us immediately from your listserv.  This offer must not lead to anything for which we will be charged in the future.  We will not subscribe to your publication and do not wish to be contacted about your available services.”

Sheesh, I thought.  I’m not selling anything.  It’s a gift.  You’re not on my “listserv” and you never were.  Climb down!   But instead I wrote back that I was pleased they’d be linking to “For English Majors” and I assured them I found the practices they described “deplorable” and wouldn’t subject them to any such thing.

You can’t blame them.  They’re gun-shy, and they’re not alone.  They’re tired of the rapid-fire pop-up ads, the “buy this” emails, the pushy questionnaires (“What’s your ideal job?”) that lead to more ads.  They’ve had it with poorly written “white papers,” once a source of real information, now thinly disguised sales brochures for products that take a little explaining (like IT security or disaster recovery).  They’ve signed up for one too many webinars that promise to teach something but digress quickly to selling something instead.

That’s one example of what marketing has done for us.  But wait.  There’s more.

I met a young man not long ago who told me he’s a firm believer in writing “thank you” notes.  Before I had a chance to agree with him, he shared this secret:  He uses a service that mass produces the notes, using technology that emulates his handwriting to produce notes that look like he wrote them.  He was beaming with pride as he described this.

“That seems to me to be counter to your intentions,” I said.

“How’s that?”

“You’re sending personal messages impersonally.”

“Ah, but that’s the beauty of it,” he explained, beaming some more.  “The recipient of the note doesn’t know it.”

Not yet.  But next time I get a thank you note (and certainly if I ever get one from him), I’ll hold it close under my nose to see if it passes the sniff test.  It won’t be long before everyone does that.

But wait.  There’s more.

An acquaintance I met through a networking event asked me, “Have you heard about this cool book publishing thing?  You pay a fee and write a chapter and your chapter is included in a book of chapters written by famous business writers.  So there you are in a volume with the likes of Ken Blanchard” (the one minute manager guy) “and Jim Collins” (the Good to Great guy).  “Just you and Ken and Jim.  Isn’t that sweet?”

No, it’s not sweet.  You buy your way into print filling the set-aside pages between Ken and Jim (who, no doubt, were handsomely compensated for appearing here with you and other showcasers).  And the integrity in that is…where?

And, of course, there’s still more.

Article-blaster.com fires whatever it is you’ve written to as many online destinations as possible for the primary purpose of driving web traffic to your site.  It doesn’t matter what you’ve written, it matters how thoroughly it’s blasted.  Publishing articles in as many places as possible is one method of maximizing visits to your website.  The byproduct is that it measures articles in bulk only.  Content, quality, relevance, and literacy don’t matter.  What matters is how close you get to the front of the Google hit parade.

So here’s what marketing “best practices” have done for business:  made consumers exceptionally protective and suspicious; enabled insincerity to achieve new heights; diluted “whitepapers” (once a centerpiece of research and credibility) to mere sales brochures; and reduced books and articles to commercial showcase platforms.

This seems to me more like planting the seeds of unshakable distrust rather practices that fuel a robust vibrant economy.

“They Won’t Read It! I’ve Tried!”

Figuring out an alternative to “death-by-PowerPoint” isn’t very hard.  You could turn off the slides and just talk without them.  You could send out a report in advance of the presentation or meeting, rather than cramming the entire report into the slides. You could place that report in a shared file repository, organized by subject, easily accessible.

No, envisioning ways around PowerPoint-heavy presentations isn’t hard.  What’s hard is making those alternatives work.  We’re so used to turning our gaze to the inevitable screen of bullet lists that it’s now impossible to imagine changing the habits of meeting participants who expect to be read to.

“We send out materials ahead of time, but no one reads them. So we’re pretty much forced to drag them through the printed word up on the screen in the meeting.  Otherwise they don’t have the information,” one of my clients told me recently.

It’s a common problem. People who are constantly pressed for time figure the one thing they can move to the bottom of their to-do list is reading.  After all, why spend time reading the material only to then sit through it again in the meeting?   Sadly, though, this approach to knowledge transfer is perpetuating the death-by-PowerPoint problem: participants who haven’t read the information that should actually be in a document—not on a slide—simply expect to gather for the group-read and plod through text-laden slides together.

It would be interesting to calculate the expense of this approach.  Total up the cost of the meeting (how many people, how many hours in the meeting, and how much they make an hour).  Ten people who make $50 an hour in a three-hour session is $1500.  Then there’s the 10 hours the slide preparers spent cramming the document into the PowerPoint slides, another $750.  Did the session deliver $2250 worth of knowledge transfer?  Would it be cheaper if people read and digested information on their own, then met to review it, rather than meeting to learn it in the first place?  An interesting financial perspective.

But, for now, we leave this problem in the category of that’s-just-the-way-it-is.

If you were, however, serious about moving dull, pedestrian text out of your slides and putting this information in status reports, strategy documents, written analyses and wherever else it actually belongs, how could you get people to read them?  Let’s start by giving some thought to why they don’t read them today.

Business writing is boring.  That’s why people don’t read it.  No one ever says, “Gee, I can hardly wait to read that project plan/stack of status reports/competitive analysis/problem report.”  Never.  People don’t like to read business documents simply because they’re dull and lifeless, and who wants to read that?  Sanitized, boiler-plate, predictable language saturates business writing.  It relies on repetitive, tried and true vocabulary, which has often been scrubbed and “approved” by management, quality teams, the legal department or HR.  Operational documents, in particular, are often template-driven, which means they amount to nothing more than forms fill-out.  Business writing, in other words, employs techniques and practices that are the opposite of good writing.

How did this happen?  There’s one obvious angle—that “approvers” are protecting business prose from possible legal exposure.  But in most industries, that doesn’t apply to many documents.

What’s really happened is that well-meaning business “communication experts,” seeking to make information easily accessible and to save readers time, decided that predictability and repeatability are essential to efficiency.  The net effect, however, is just the opposite: no one is reading any of it.  How efficient is that?  These same well-meaning business document designers should take a lesson from writing that’s actually readable and engaging, the kind of writing people choose to read.  Good writing is never predictable and repeatable.

Yeah, you’re thinking, but this isn’t a plot-rich fictional account of the lives of memorable characters.  We’re talking about facts here, just boring old data.  Well, if that’s what you think of strategic planning, problem-solving, competition, innovation, financial risk, on-the-job conflict, and team dysfunction—that it’s all just boring old data—then I guess you can stick with the unreadable, sanitized style business readers are, sadly, used to.  But as Edward Tufte says about boring old data, “If the statistics are boring, then you’ve got the wrong numbers.”

If, by chance, you’re persuaded that better writing is possible, what can you do about it?  Hire an English major?  Not a bad idea.  (I’m not kidding.)  Or perhaps find the English majors in your midst.  Many companies today have Communication Departments, teams who write the newsletter, create messages about company earnings and events, and generate press releases.  However one thing Communications teams rarely do is write or edit operational documents—project plans, status reports, requirements documents, financial notes, meeting minutes, and all the other things our reluctant readers don’t read.

Perhaps they should.  Instead of sending business professionals to three-day “Business Writing” classes (an impossible timeframe in which to learn to write, as anyone who’s been to these classes will attest), instead enlist writers in the operational work of the company.

Knowledge is the tool we use to create goods and services.  It’s the lifeblood of projects, strategy-setting, problem-solving, and technology creation, and it’s the primary source of revenue in industry today.  We should stop settling for ho-hum, inefficient methods of transferring knowledge, especially when optimizing the delivery of information just takes a little imagination and a willingness to overthrow an established practice most people don’t like anyway.

Graphical Excellence in the Real World

Technical Presentations and PowerPoint

In every organization I’ve been in—both the clients I teach for today and the companies I worked for during my own 25-year career in Information Technology—the complaints about PowerPoint slides in technical presentations are the same:  they’re confusing, too dense, they seem disorganized, they’re hard to follow, they’re obscuring the message, and sometimes they’re even boring.

Some complainers and consultants recommend simplifying the messages—one idea per slide, for example, or cut back on the information, reduce it to whatever will fit on the screen in a big font.  But that does a disservice to the content.  The solution isn’t to render them “lite.”  Instead, the solution is to design them in ways that best serve the information they’re trying to deliver.  They keyword in that sentence is “design”—and I don’t mean colorful background templates.  I mean design that promotes comprehension, design that augments information rather than decorates it.

Galileo, Da Vinci, and Graphical Excellence                

For the last few of years, I’ve been using the ideas and advice of Edward Tufte in my class, “Effective Technical Presentations.”  Some participants in my class are already familiar with Mr. Tufte, as he’s a rather renown subject matter expert in the area of visual display.  The New York Times, for example, referred to him as the “Leonardo da Vinci of data,” and the Washington Post has called him the “Galileo of graphics.”  One might not need more in the way of credentials than that, but we could also add that he’s taught statistics, graphical design and political economy at Yale.

In the last thirty years, Mr. Tufte has gathered and analyzed examples of graphic representations of information from throughout history and from a range of fields of study—architecture, history, scientific discovery, and musical composition.  He’s perhaps best known as someone who is exceptionally critical of PowerPoint, at least as it’s put into practice by most users of it.  He demonstrates in example after example how PowerPoint invites us to degrade and smother rich content by reducing it to nothing more than big letters on a screen decorated by occasional clip art, gratuitous colors and lines, and generally poor design work.

Mr. Tufte’s recommendations are especially relevant for engineering and technical presentations because every technical presenter must convey complex ideas, facts and discoveries clearly and memorably, and just about every technical presentation depends on PowerPoint slides to do so.  (Some presenters, in fact, mistakenly think their slide deck is their presentation.)

In The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Mr. Tufte sets out prescriptive guidelines for preparing visuals in his “Principles of Graphical Excellence.”  Chief among them is that slides must be “well-designed.”  He offers hundreds of examples in his materials (books, website) of great design.

But even after viewing them, most people are still left wondering how to achieve design excellence.  It sounds reasonable but it’s a significant leap to prepare slides that live up to Mr. Tufte’s standards when what most presenters have been doing up until now is simply typing up speaking notes into a stream of slides which are interleaved now and then with an occasional hastily prepared graphic.

Even if someone were lucky or talented enough to hit on the right inspiration for a great design, what are the chances they’d have enough time in a typical workday to create the kind of visuals Mr. Tufte insists are needed?

When Reality Compromises Perfection

You can make considerable improvements in slide prep that will much better serve your high content material, even when you don’t hit the design jackpot.  Here are a few suggestions to improve the PowerPoint portion of your presentation.

First of all, before creating a slide, decide whether what you’re about to create should be a slide at all.  Some things to ask yourself:  Am I creating a slide that’s really nothing more than a cheat-sheet for me so I remember what I’m supposed to say next?  If yes, skip it. That’s not a reason to create a slide.

Another question:  Does the information I’m about to put on a slide do anything other than provide documentation?  In other words, should it be a document instead?  If yes, skip it.  That’s not a reason to create a slide.

Another question:  Does the information I’m putting on this slide amount to nothing more than a bullet list of phrases?  What you want is a cogent argument, not a thin sketch of a few unfinished ideas.  A bullet list of phrases isn’t doing much to promote understanding of complex, rich content material. Skip it.  That doesn’t belong on a slide.

Another question:  Does the slide contain a complete story—cause and effect, accountability for the information, a full set of data? Or is the point of this slide to “spin” the story?  If yes, reconsider.

So now you’ve whittled down the number of slides you were going to create.  Here are some other things you can do to improve the slides you are about to create.

Skip the doo-dads.  In other words, don’t decorate your data with clip art, color, or meaningless shapes.  Don’t put boxes around words or phrases or don’t put (or allow PowerPoint to put) bullets, dashes, or other wingdings in front of words.  They’re just clutter.

Bypass the PowerPoint templates. They’re just decoration.  Keep your audience’s focus on your information, not the shade of green it’s wrapped in.  Your audience has enough to figure out without visual distraction.

Omit anything that doesn’t carry information.  That includes the branding, at least the branding on every page, the repetition of the logo and company name.  I know many Marketing Departments will take me to task for suggesting such heresy, but branding is, first of all, an unnecessary visual distraction and, second of all, it sort of obscures ownership.  Who created this information?  Oh look, it says right here:  “ABC, Inc.”  Not helpful.  How can anyone track the information to its source?

Write a document when a document is called for.  I’m frequently surprised by how much text goes into slides that actually belongs in some written deliverable where it might be read and remembered rather than viewed (usually at an unreadable distance) and forgotten.  So move things out of slide format that don’t belong in slides and put them into documents instead. (Try sending the document out before the meeting and ask people to read it ahead of time.  Include a bribe—cookies for everyone who does the pre-work!  Retention of the material will improve.)

And finally, try to create slides and visual displays of information people can really linger over. They should be lingering because there’s so much to enjoy or discover, not because it’s so confusing they can’t find their way out.  If it takes only a second to get the visual and the audience becomes instantly impatient, then your visual isn’t accomplishing enough.

You may yet hit on a fabulous, inspired design for your visual displays now and then.  But when you don’t, employing these guidelines will help you create leaner, clearer materials.

Persuasive Business Writing

Taking it Personally

 Business writing is often about persuading others – persuading them to buy, to invest, to be patient, or simply to have confidence in a product. 

In technical environments, writing assignments are also about persuasion, and the challenge is compounded by the complexity of the topics and the incredible rate of change that forces issues out into the open sometimes before they’re ready.  The rate of change in technology, a key driver of competition, infuses technical issues with human zeal beyond what one might expect from engineers (a profession not known for emotional high drama).

 Nonetheless, it is true:  High tech runs wild with impassioned believers who champion one technology or another.  The prospect of favoring one software product over another, one infrastructure product over another, means criticizing – directly or indirectly – the competition.  People take that personally.

 So how can you put forward a proposal, a report, an architectural design, or a tech strategy recommendation in writing that transcends the emotionalism and gets the points across?  While there’s no guaranteed formula for success, here are some suggestions that can help.

 Find a Rock to Stand on with Others

 If there’s a technology shift in your future, or the prospect of introducing some technical change, there must be a reason for doing so.  Whatever the objective of the change is should be called out explicitly in whatever is written.  If the goal is to retire old systems or move away from a failing technology to something newer and more reliable, then the objective – a stable, robust environment – is easy to “get behind.”  If the goal is to achieve cost savings by reducing the number of products in use, few people will argue that’s not a responsible thing to do, even if they disagree about the means to get there.

 Finding a shared objective is a good place to start.  Even if the goal is one set by upper management based on “the numbers” (a subject often of limited interest to true techies), the expectation is that all will rally to it.  Making that a premise of what you’ve written is an important point to make early on:  “This is why we’re doing it.”

 Once you’ve established, then put into words, exactly what the aim is of making a change, you can refer to it later, reminding readers how your recommendation meets the goal.

 Recognize Other Approaches

 It’s unlikely that your recommendation is the only approach on the market.  The number of products on the market today that solve just about any conceivable problem was unimaginable even a decade ago.  Even if you believe deeply in what you are recommending, you should acknowledge that there are alternatives, even viable alternatives, that are deserving of respect.

 Of course, if you don’t actually think there are workable alternatives, then don’t say there are.  Insincerity is easy to spot.  But – especially if you think you know that your readership is prepared to resist your suggestions because they already have this all figured out – acknowledge the merits of other approaches.  You’re showing you have a balanced view of the alternatives, and your assessment of the limitations will be more credible.

 Demonstrate Your Homework

 You wouldn’t be writing this recommendation (proposal, strategy, etc.) if you hadn’t done your research.  Accuracy counts, and it is even more important when entering controversial territory.  If there’s uncertainty about a product’s ability to handle volume, respond quickly, perform fail-over operations or handle sub-zero temperatures in field work, make sure you know the facts about these capabilities before you swear your allegiance to it. 

 There is no end of research material to assist technology professionals, not the least of which are the Gartner and Giga research databases, for which many companies have memberships that allow them access to the work of powerful, respected analysts.  If you don’t have the advantage of using this data, there’s always Google.  Besides the internet, there are also reference librarians at universities and industry journals that are available online.  So there’s really no excuse for under-researched reports.

 

Impartial, correct information can intercept an argument.

 

Provide a Balanced View

 No technology product is perfect, and everyone (except, perhaps, sales people) knows that.  Just as acknowledging the strengths of competing ideas makes your criticisms of them credible, so does acknowledging the weaknesses of your idea make your recommendation credible.

 

Acknowledge That You May Be Wrong

 Even if you’re head-over-heels in love with your design, recommendation or discovery, keep in mind that you may be wrong.  Technology is not an exact science.  What you’re sure of today could be called into question tomorrow.  For example, a complementary product, one which your design depends on, may suddenly announce an overhaul that calls into question its overall reliability. 

 

You can’t predict the future, even though you need to in order to be certain in this business.  As long as that is true, admit there’s a margin for error.  Executives, especially, don’t like to hear this.  They live for certainty, at least they need to appear so in order to perform their leadership function.  Still, recognizing that what you’ve written contains a margin for error is the responsible thing to do.  It also adds humility to your profile as a business writer.

 

Respect Your Readership

 While we’re on that point – No one likes to read a business document that reeks of over-confidence.  People who write don’t have all the answers.  They have questions they’re attempting to answer, and they’re serving up the product to an informed group of readers.

 There’s a certain intimacy in writing – business writing included – and readers can tell whether they’re respected.  They expect to be, as you do when you’re a reader.  Make sure they can sense that in all that you’ve written, and your messages will enjoy greater acceptance.